self-important navel-gazing from someone who really ought to get out a bit more

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

limping across the line and doing the best with what we've got...

i have just emailed out my last few roughs at the end of what feels like a marathon 12 months of work. no more deadlines now until the new year...

and the past few weeks have been a real struggle - in hindsight i've not really recovered from the effort expended on the advent thing [see previous post] and for a couple of weeks i've been on the verge of succumbing to man-flu without ever actually getting properly ill... [maybe it's seasonally affected disorder. or maybe sue's right and i'm just a hypochondriac...]

when i'm run down like this work becomes a right old struggle - when i'm drawing, things that i'd normally do without thinking suddenly stop happening and i end up correcting and re-drafting just to get things correctly proportioned and stuff... all very irritating.

then there's the ongoing frustrations of our building project... i've not blogged about it much, partly because i really don't want this journal to become a big moan-fest [no, really] and partly because the best way of coping with the whole messy business has been just to try not to think about it too much. so, without going into unecessary detail, my new studio/office is still nowhere near finished over a year after work on it began... [sigh]

but then this morning bloc party came up on the macbook's iTunes - there's a sequence of three tunes off of their last album ['kreuzberg', 'i still remember' and 'sunday'] which is just brilliant; the sort of slightly euphoric, anthemic, uplifting stuff that i am a complete sucker for. 'sunday' in particular is great - a lovely, sort-of-clumsy love song... a reminder that life is good, that it's sometimes the small things that can mean the most, that there is so much to be thankful for and to be hopeful about... sometimes you just have to lift your head and look up to see it.

and here's the finished version of one of those maths illustrations...